Google opens alphabetti spaghetti with refined spelling in search

Web queries for an illiterate age

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Google has tweaked its search engine to speed up queries for users who are prone to spelling mishaps.

Mountain View said on Friday that it had made three enhancements to help web surfers input their searches more quickly and easily.

It has plumped up the automatic correction of misspelled search words to include 31 languages and improved spell correction for names. The company has also refined Google Suggest by adding a feature that searches for terms based on where someone using the search engine is located.

The ad broker launched Google Suggest last year, but at that point it only grouped searches together according to which country they originated from. The tweak enables a much more detailed search within a specific geographical area.

"Just as people in the UK often look for different things than people in US, we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas," said the firm's search wonk Pandu Nayak in a blog post.

"So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the US." ®